I don't think very much of people who say the fight between Obama and Clinton undermines progressives generally in the upcoming general election. When you see that most average voters like both, that most are excited by the race and that people refer to a shared ticket as a "dream team," it just doesn't seem plausible. In other words, I'm with The Daily News on this question. My explanation? In a 24-hour news cycle with their race in the constant loop as the top story, it's just something for talking heads to say.

And keep saying.

Ad nauseum.

One way or another, we have to end this Bush'ly era, and I think we will. One way or another. The GOP, it turns out, isn't that great for the economy. You might have seen that jobless claims have hit a two year high and that it has been three years since so many people were drawing Unemployment.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that new applications filed for unemployment insurance jumped by a seasonally adjusted 38,000 to 407,000 for the week ending March 29. The increase left claims at their highest point since Sept. 17, 2005, following the blows of the devastating Gulf Coast hurricanes.

Turns out that this is just a paragraph in a larger story of GOP mismanagement of the economy. Under the Republicans watch, inequality tends to rise. There's been a bit of a buzz in the economists' piece of the blogosphere about data that shows that things get better at the top and worse at the bottom when the Grand Ole Party has the reins. From Harvard Economist Dani Rodrik:

When a Republican president is in power, people at the top of the income distribution experience much larger real income gains than those at the bottom--a difference of 1.5 percent per year going from the bottom to the top quintile in the income distribution. The situation is reversed when a Democrat is in power: those who benefit the most are the lower income groups.

The data is spelled out in a forthcoming book by Larry Bartels; Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. If this is, in fact, a "new gilded age," it would be nice to end it with something more like The Populist Moment than The Great Depression (their, Jennifer, some more YPP book club selections).

If the data Bartels presents means anything, then we need to set aside all this silliness about the cost of Obama and Clinton's debate. Let it play out, but, come November, I think the country knows what it has to do.

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This Too Will Pass

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